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Nederlands Dans Theater 2 and English National Ballet NDT2: May 2003 London, Sadler's Wells London, Linbury Studio Theatre © Jeffery Taylor Former dancer, Critic and an Arts feature writer for the |
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The opening London season of Nederlands Dans Theater 2's current UK tour was a cool not to say chilling evening by the super talented dance wunderkind, all aged just 17-22. The curtain raiser is promising, though. In the few seconds it takes for a man's eye to rove over a passing female, Johan Inger's Dream Play explores the primeval sources and cosmic potency of the poor fellow's sexual spasm. Stravinsky's Rite of Spring thuds and shudders as four men, led by the amazing Medhi Walerski, come to grips with the facts of life in the shape of a couple of girls and it is much more fun than it sounds. Shutters Shut is a piece of virtually static mime illustrating a reading of a Gertrude Stein poem. The two dancers, synchronised then syncopated, express the meaning but more often the rhythm of the spoken word, and provide light relief before Subject To Change. Set to Schubert's Death and The Maiden, Lightfoot and Leon's choreography is as precisely structured as the music and despite the two technically fabulous lead dancers, Marthe Krummenacher and Walerski, feels as passionate as an entry for the Nobel Prize for Physics. Parvaneh Scharafali and Bastien Zorzetto close the show in the final duet of Jiri Kylian's 27'52". The slow motion coupling by the topless pair on a bare, dimly lit stage has an eerie tension, but the consummation of their cold sweaty lust is buried beneath a pile of discarded plastic. The dancers are superb - versatile, beautiful and committed but you cannot help wondering at their impact if unleashed from the suspected restraints of creativity by committee and the imperative of ticks in the right boxes.
However English National Ballet's Thomas Edur gave us one piercing moment of anguished emotion in his own composition (If) in his company's choreographic workshop in Covent Garden. Brought up without knowing his father, the loss of his mother in the 1994 Estonian ferry disaster remains a major wound for Edur, one of Britain's finest lyrical dancers and he rarely talks of it. Instead in IF he pours it out in dance. Almost as naked as the day he was born, Edur's link to what might have been is a silk scarf triggering untrammelled grief, incomprehension and exhausted acceptance. Quite a tribute using dance as art in the truest sense.
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